Digital Development for Uni.

I've finished for christmas now so here's some of what I've been working on!

Photoshop Development: 

Here I've started to play with the idea of mixing illustration with photography by digitally overlaying my drawings on top of my photographs using Photoshop using a variety of different filters and techniques to see what the effects were. 

Screen: Dark Areas are Translucent

The above was a happy accident with the second tree from the right; I really like the way the watercolour was has come through on photoshop. It's clearer that black or dark marks become transparent using the screen filter so I want to try and develop this idea further... 

 

I really like how these came out, the simpler lines are really striking and much more noticeable against the photo which I like; it's simplified the chaos of the more detailed drawings I've used previously. 

Exclusion: white goes blue, black goes white, similar to cyanotypes: 

 

Screen Development: 

Woodgrain:

Monochrome:

 

Print Edits: 

The following are some examples of using the prints I made the other day to see how they would react to being digitally manipulated. I really like how the words make give the image another subtle layer to them, which in my opinion adds an interesting  addition. I particularly like how the last images came out once I started cutting them up and manipulating them into an almost fairytale collage like style.

Printmaking!

Dry point Plate:

I decided to try out some drypoint etchings as I thought they would suit the line drawings I had drawn previously with a focus on the wood grain patterns and lines of the trees. I tried a variety of techniques and after re-photographing and editing some of my favourites; these are some of the results:

Playing with the amount of ink on the plate: 

Here I have tried printing using the cotton bud to remove some of the ink, leaving an almost vignette effect with more ink around the edges and a cleaner plate. Personally I like the vignetted effect as it adds some of the atmosphere of the forest back into the image. 

  

I really like these combination of colours, when I put them onto the plate they created an almost grain like appearance which I wanted to see what it would print like: 

The texture is interesting but it didn't quite work out like I thought it would: 

Book Paper:

I like using a lot of old book paper as a background, so I thought the combination of the texture and words running up the trees would be interesting however this didn't quite go as planned. Because the paper is too thin to soak I used a dry piece at first which didn't pick up a lot of the finer areas of ink except for the edges where I had left more ink on purpose for the vignetting, with some experimentation, I did eventually manage a very faint impression of the trees but not enough to create a well finished print. I think that these would work nicely as filters though, so I'm glad I tried it.

Flowers: 

I had a bag of pressed flowers lying around which I thought linked in nicely to the forest theme; initially I wanted to make up some collagraph plates using these but not having the money for mountboard I decided to see what would happen if I incorporated them into the drypoint process; I really like the results achieved, especially the imprints left behind on the plates after going through the press which I have included some photos of as the prints didn't turn out like them.  It would be interesting to see what would happen with something more translucent like a skeleton leaf.

Edited Prints: 

I really like how these came out, they almost have a childlike fairytale theme to them.

I photographed the imprints off the back of the plates too as I thought they might make interesting texture filters with the combination of tissue paper and ink: 

Arnside Location Shooting

Today a flatmate and I helped Sam out with a location shoot for a brief he's working on for uni which involved a day out in Arnside. It was a lot of fun but very cold and rainy at times; as you can see I used one of my favourite art filters Film grain on the journey there to emphasise the atmospheric weather....